Mark Zuckerberg's Letter to Prospective Facebook Investors

In the letter Zuckberberg says that the company “was built to accomplish a social mission” and claims, “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”

He spends a lot of time talking about a word that I’ve never seen in an S1 filing — at least not in a positive light. “‘Hacker,” he wrote, “has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.” As you scroll down and read his letter, you’ll see he has a lot to say about the “Hacker Way.”

Usage stats

Later in the filing, Facebook disclosed:

It had 845 million active users as of the end of last year, an increase of 39% over the previous year.

More than half (483 million) of those users were active on a daily basis, compared to 327 million at the end of 2010.

During December, 2011, it had on average 360 million users who were active on at least six out of the last seven days.

There were more than 100 billion friend connections as of the end of 2011

On average, more than 250 photos were uploaded each day. Finally, users generated an aveage of 2.7 billion “Likes” and comments per day during the last three months of 2011.

“Platform developers” (mostly app creators) received more than $1.48 billion from transactions through the service.

Here is the full text of Zuckerberg’s letter:

Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.

We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

At Facebook, we’re inspired by technologies that have revolutionized how people spread and consume information. We often talk about inventions like the printing press and the television — by simply making communication more efficient, they led to a complete transformation of many important parts of society. They gave more people a voice. They encouraged progress. They changed the way society was organized. They brought us closer together. Read More